By Dom VK2JNA

After the fun 7 weeks ago of the Australian based RD contest I thought I’d have a crack at the Oceania DX contest (phone).

Antennas
Lots of dreaming & a little last minute 2nd antenna building happened to complement my main endfed 40/20/10 dipole. I again used the 12m spiderbeam popup mast, this time with 10.82m wire taped to it. Why 10.82m (35.5 ft)? With a “random” length wire, what I didn’t want is to end up with a half wavelength on any of the HF Ham bands. People have done the calcs & with a spreadsheet we can do them ourselves, however I took the longest published “safe” length I could fit on my 12m squiddy (see reference below). This was fed by an SGC SG-230 autotuner at the base with 3 random (10m+) radials lying on the ground. I originally dreamed of having the mast on the first floor balcony with a true counterpoise, however it was windy which had me ground mount the mast & some sturdy rope tied it at 4m height to balcony & a tree, which certainly did the mechanical job. Plenty of weird looks from Covid pedestrians given this was all in my front yard. I’m suprised no-one called A Z O.

This new temporary antenna could be used on all HF bands & I did go through all bands & transmit a carrier at a few points just to get the tuner’s memories pre-programmed so tuning would be quicker during the competition. I had to retune evey 10kHz on 160m wheras one tune per band from 30m up sufficed for all the shorter wavelength bands. I used it on 160/80/15 for this comp.

Early Setback
At the start of the contest I fired up VKCL as my logging program only to find it “stuck” in RD contest mode. It wouldn’t allow me to select Oceania. Two hasty phone calls to Greg VK2XE & Nick VK2FS had me pulling hair. The eventual fix was, uninstall, delete the directory C:\VKCL , re-install & re-run. THIS then let me start a new contest. So, there’s 12minutes of the contest I wont get back! I’d better find out the real answer before the next contest.

The Contest
My first contact was to a friend David VK2CZ which got me settled again. I worked 6 hours from 4pm – 10pm with 50min break for dinner with my family. I hit the sack & asked Siri to wake me at 2am which she suggested was 3am (rightly so, Daylight Saving changeover!). Getting up I found the bands essentially dead & called it quits after 20mins with no extra contacts. This was quite different to my experience with the previous RD contest where things were absolutely humming between 1-4am. I found the contest enjoyable, particularly having many more overseas stations calling in, compared to RD. There were the usual struggles when I heard a big overseas station that couldn’t always hear me (Low Power) but you work that out pretty quick & move on. Many years ago I watched Benrd Langer VK2IA contesting & asked him for his biggest tip – “Go for the multipliers” & so I was always on the lookout for a station area (VK0, VK1…)I had not worked on that band. Gee that really helps ramp up the points.

Contacts
Plenty of contacts including VK0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7
Also NZ, Italy, Poland, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria, Czech Rep, Croatia as well as a few stateside & Hawaii.

Submission of Contest Log
This was quite easy & I’d done it within 5 mins of finishing from with VKCL itself, receiving a confirmation email directly.

QSL
I have also managed to learn that I can also output an ADIF file from VKCL which I then uploaded to my QRZ logbook. I can see quite a few other contesters have as well, which automatically has confimed many of my contacts. I encourage any other contesters to do this as well, its quite easy.

Wrapup
It was great to hear plenty of MWRS friends & associates. All in all another good fun weekend contesting.

See this webpage & the green “safe” numbers for suggested lengths of “random” wire.
https://ve7sar.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-best-random-wire-antenna-lengths.html

Dom Bragge, VK2JNA
October 2021